Shashi Tharoor, Pax Indica: India
and the World of the 21st Century, ( New Delhi : Penguin Books India ,
2012), Pages: 456, Price: Rs. 799.
The title of Shashi Tharoor’s new
book, Pax Indica, can mislead an unwary reader. The book does not offer a
blueprint for India ’s rise to imperial status in the current century. A more
modest role is envisaged for India , that of helping to define the norms of
tomorrow’s new networked world, write the rules and have a voice in their
application. But the book is not really about this either. It is more an
overview of India’s relations with its neighbours, South- East Asia, China, the
US, the Arab countries, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, with separate
chapters on India and the UN and Soft Power and Public Diplomacy, and a final
chapter on Multi-Alignment as a “Grand Strategy” for India in the decades
ahead.
The new norms and rules that India
would work on, how they would be different from the ones that the West considers
universal, and the means India will deploy to achieve success are not spelt out
in the book. In actual fact, the author believes that the world having been made
“safe of democracy”, India ’s vocation should be the promotion of democracy and
human rights world wide along with “major allies” like the US . This suggests
adjusting to Western norms more than redefining them, which is in fact what the
West expects of others.
The reader would have greater than
usual interest in Tharoor’s latest book because he would be writing from a
double perspective – that of his long experience in international diplomacy as a
UN civil servant and a brief exposure at the political level to India’s
foreign-policymaking as a junior Minister in the Ministry of External Affairs
(MEA). However, rather than this double experience combining to give more
cohesion to his analysis of India’s foreign policy in the current century, it
produces some inconsistencies.
An instance of this is the
disproportionate attention given to groups such as BIMSTEC ( Bay of Bengal
Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) and the
IOC-ARC (the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation) and the
exaggerated enthusiasm with which their potential is described. The eight pages
devoted to BIMSTEC contrast with one paragraph each that Japan and South Korea
merit, and the less than three pages of superficial treatment of Russia . While
Europe gets the same space as BIMSTEC, the author considers the continent
irrelevant to India ’s strategic interests. He claims that “there’s nothing like
the IOC-ARC in the annals of global diplomacy” and rhapsodizes thus in
UN-speak:
When the IOC-ARC meets, new windows
are opened between countries separated by distance as well as politics.
Malaysians talk with Mauritians, Arabs with Australians, South Africans with Sri
Lankans, Iranians with Indonesians. The India Ocean serves as both a sea
separating them and a bridge binding them together.
Doesn’t the UN at New York do all
this too?
Some other inconsistencies in the
book probably derive from the author’s reluctance as a former Minister and
Congress Member of Parliament to criticize the government’s policies. Tharoor’s
analysis of the roots of Pakistan’s deep-seated hostility towards India is most
perspicacious and hard-headed, but even as the reader is being convinced that
Pakistan cannot be trusted and dialoguing with it would not be productive, the
author dutifully purveys all the contestable arguments of the government to
justify resuming the dialogue, adding some jejune ones of his own, such as “what
we say when we talk that will make the difference” and that a dialogue allows
India to make clear to Pakistan “its bottom lines and minimum standards of
civilized conduct”. He is very dismissive about the India-Pakistan Track-2
dialogues, but slips into candlelight phraseology in advocating a show of
“magnanimity and generosity of spirit that in itself stands an outside chance of
persuading Pakistanis to rethink their attitude to us”. Homilies such as “To
acknowledge that trust does not exist right now, however, is not to suggest that
trust can never be built” and that “The time has come ... for the victims of
geography to make history” cannot be the basis of serious policy. He does
not explain how but wants “New Delhi to do its best to ensure that the Islamabad
establishment abandons the conviction that terrorism is the only effective
instrument that obliges India to sit up and pay attention to Pakistan and engage
with its interests”. Rather surprisingly for a UN hand, he believes India can
have sanctions imposed on Pakistan under UN Chapter VII resolutions on
terrorism, overlooking that the US, despite serious Pakistani provocations, has
not used this instrument against Pakistan and any action in the UN Security
Council will need US and Chinese assent.
The author is
right to affirm that India is no longer in the same league as China
economically, but some of his other views on India-China relations are
debatable. He seems to believe, without any apparent basis, that India has a
genuine strategic partnership with China and that this relationship has
broadened to include “the wider civil society in both nations”. His view that
Chinese and Indian economies are complementary will be contested by those who
argue that the relationship has become colonial-like in structure – export of
raw materials versus import of manufactured goods. He visualizes India- China
cooperation on nuclear disarmament when China refuses to hold nuclear parleys
with India because it does not consider the latter a nuclear power. His repeated
assertions that China and India have a common interest in keeping sea lanes open
overlook India’s strategic concerns about China’s increased presence in the
Indian Ocean and the South China Sea imbroglio. The author is absolutely right
about enhancing relations between India and Taiwan .
The chapter on the US is a mixture
of several sharp insights and questionable assumptions. At one point the author
notes Obama’s “substantive assurance” of support for India ’s permanent
membership of the Security Council and at another he characterizes it as
“largely symbolic” and a “rhetorical flourish”. (In the chapter on the UN and
global commons he gives an excellent analysis of the issues involved in
expanding the Security Council in both permanent and non-permanent categories.)
How the two countries can cooperate to counter nuclear proliferation is not
explained. To say that there is no real clash between India and the US on
“geopolitical fundamentals” is exaggerating the degree of convergence. It is
debatable whether the relationship with India is going to be as important to
American security as that with Europe once was. India and the US , the author
says, “share a responsibility for preserving a rule-based open and democratic
order” and the global commons, without clarifying the nature of this
responsibility and who would define it because India itself has not done it so
far. His belief that India and the US as the two principal democracies have
special interests and responsibilities exaggerates India’s willingness to assume
such a global role and overlooks the United States’ historical and continuing
courting of authoritarian states in its larger national interest.
Tharoor rightly underlines the
importance of India ’s relations with the Arab world because of critical energy,
trade, human resources and remittance links. But to say that the centuries-old
India-Arab links have given the peoples on the two sides “a similarity of
perceptions and cultural mores” is an obvious exaggeration, as is the assertion
that “our geopolitical aspirations are entirely compatible”.
On Iran , the Shia-Sunni issue,
and the role of Saudi Arabia and Qatar in Libya and Syria this is not true. That
Iran has been a “kindred spirit of India ” on Pakistan , that it is a “friend at
Court” in the Islamic world and that it considers India a useful source of “high
technology” is not supported by facts.
Africa and Latin America get the
requisite attention in the book. While the overview is informative, India ’s
sentiments towards Africa are expressed in extraordinarily mushy
language:
India and Africa have been close to
each other for so many centuries that our relationship is not one of immediate
give and take but has been that of a family where each one provides the best
advice, the best support and the best sharing of experience, so that when we
walk the same path, we learn from each other and do not make the same
mistakes.
Tharoor
exaggerates the impact of India’s soft power on the current century, using
mellifluous prose to make his point. While India’s democracy and pluralism, its
composite culture, management of diversity, Bollywood et al. earn it respect,
how can India be the “land of the better story” globally with its dysfunctional
democracy, poor governance, abysmal levels of poverty, low human welfare
indices, urban decay, lack of sanitation, etc.? On page 410 he himself lists
India ’s dramatic underperformance in many areas. Tharoor ignores the hard-power
foundation of soft power acknowledged by Robert Nye, the originator of the
concept of “soft power”.
The author’s views on the MEA,
which he mockingly calls the Ministry of Eternal Affairs, are unflattering. The
well-known shortcomings of the Ministry which he lists – to which international
attention has been drawn by a US researcher – cannot be denied. While the
Ministry is manifestly understaffed, mid-level lateral entry on a large scale is
not an answer. Where will competent mid-level recruits come from? A successful
remodelling of the MEA has to be part of an overall administrative services
reform. The author explains well the ineffectual role of Parliament in foreign
affairs and he is right about the centralization of foreign policy decisions on
important issues in the PMO.
Not surprisingly, Tharoor deplores
the non-aligned phase of India ’s foreign policy. In his view, Indian diplomacy
is concerned more with principles than interests, privileging intellect over
interest and process over outcome, but he does not give any example to sustain
this sweeping generalization. He wants India to adopt a gentler and more
accommodative tone on the multilateral high table, an advice that would not
appeal to those who recall the hectoring of India during the CTBT negotiations
and have heard the rantings of some Ambassadors in the Security Council on Libya
, Iran and Syria .
Tharoor’s version of
India ’s “grand strategy” would see us in the US-led camp of liberal democracies
besieged by Islamist terrorism and Chinese authoritarianism, forgetting that it
is the US that has propped Islamism and China in the first place.
He wants India to
“be true to its soul in the multilateral arena” and espouse vigorously the
“Community of Democracies”, though this would require reconciliation with the
rationale of India ’s adherence to political groups like RIC
(Russia-India-China) and BRICS. Tharoor is wary of multipolarity; but
mutli-alignment, which he strongly recommends as the axis of India’s future
foreign policy, presupposes a diffusion of power within the international system
and recognition that in the absence of an international consensus on the
promotion of the Western agenda of democracy and human rights, which many
countries see as selective and geopolitically driven, India has to maintain a
balance between different approaches to such fundamental issues as respect for
sovereignty, non-interference in internal affairs, regime change policies and
concepts like the right to intervene and protect.
Tharoor decries
the fact that India ’s “old obsession with strategic autonomy remains”. In his
view, “strategic autonomy is all very well, but it cannot be the be-all and
end-all of India ’s attitude to the world”. While he cautions against
antagonizing the US for maintaining energy supplies from Iran , he affirms
somewhat inconsistently that “no power on earth can presume to dictate to India
on any international issue”. India has “more in common with the countries of the
North than the global South”, he says, contradicting his own
paeans to BIMSTEC, IOR-ARC, IBSA and relations with Africa, the Arab world,
Latin America, India’s neighbours, and, to boot, East Timor.
In virtually every chapter Tharoor
quotes extensively David Malone (seventeen times), a former Canadian envoy to
India , to buttress his views. His “internationalism” probably explains the need
for such external endorsement of his thinking on key facets of India ’s foreign
policy.
KANWAL SIBAL Former Ambassador of
India to France and Russia Former Foreign Secretary, Ministry of External
Affairs New Delhi
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